By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
BARRY COMMONERAs the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.
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After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it – removing that advantage for all firms.
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Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
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Everything is connected to everything else.
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We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
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Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
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The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.
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If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
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I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
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In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.
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My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.
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The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
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In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
BARRY COMMONER






